Bringing It to Life

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Bringing It to Life

The Return (Remake)→

Bringing It to Life is the ninth and the final segment featured in Until Dawn's Bonus Content. It describes the process of recreating the Wendigo from the myths: their appearance, behavior, and the sound design.

Preview

The Wendigo's character model as seen in the video.

The video starts off as Lee Robinson (Production Design Director) starts describing the appearance of the Wendigo. Sketches and concepts played a key role in recreating the Wendigo. The dead, milky eyes, the lost lips and eyelids, and the long fangs, arms and legs all fuse together to create the Wendigo.

Then, Jamie Galipeau (Animation Director) goes into the detail about the movement and the behavior of the Wendigo. The creature leaps at one moment, then crawls at another. The Wendigo has an intense hunger for flesh, which fuels its anger. The anger can be felt through the sounds of the Wendigo. The breaths and the screams are recreated through animal sounds combined with human noises.

Transcript

[Jack] Just move over there. Go on, move. Let me say what I came to say. I'm here to tell you what you're up against being back on this mountain. You should never have returned. I don't know why you did after what happened last year.

[Ashley] You mean with Hannah and Beth? [Chris] Yeah, how could you know without being involved? [Jack] I don't take kindly to you kids coming up here to my mountain.

[Mike] Your mountain? [Jack] The mountain don't belong to me, it's true. But it don't belong to the Washingtons. This mountain belongs to the Wendigo.

[Lee Robinson] Hi, this is Lee Robinson, production designer at Supermassive Games. Understanding the ancient myths of the Wendigo was key for their development that helped the visual look. Through sketches and concepts, these elements were visualized, such as eyes being milky, almost dead, with loss of lips and eyelids due to frostbite. Fangs growing and arms and legs getting longer, with skin hardening and thickening to look snarling and menacing, yet withered and lean. Fingers and toenails extending like claws, allowing them to climb effortlessly. We made them look gaunt and weathered, having ragged remains of clothes they wore, bloodstained and rotten, with patches of hair still remaining. They retained strong skeletal limbs, which enable them to be agile and quick through the environment.

[Mike] Where are you?

[Jamie Gallipo] My name is Jamie Gallipo, animation director at Supermassive. The overall direction on the creature was to be very strong, to be extremely fast. We wanted a spider-like movement to the creature, one minute it's scampering, to leaping, and then crawling. Almost instantaneous. And finally, we wanted the creature to have this real, uncontrollable thirst for flesh.

From a sound design perspective, the Wendigo is a real challenge. For the main vocalizations of the Wendigo, we used our own vocalizations, various different animals from the exotic to the farmyard. Various plugins and processes to gel these sounds together and keep a human resonance behind that voice, telling the backstory of the Wendigo. During the chase sequences, the anger of the Wendigo is felt by encircling breaths, screams, and screeches that essentially chase you as you're being chased by the Wendigo. We would lay them up in a multitude of layers, sometimes 15, 20 sounds playing at the same time, to build up the vocalizations for this fearsome creature which is always in attack mode, hyperactive, and chasing you throughout the game.

Video

Until Dawn - Bonus Content - Bringing it to Life